The hallowed halls of academia may have filled with a dizzying array of counter-culture fashion since the 1960s, but like its fellow fashion statement the corduroy jacket, the academic beard continues to hold fast to the faces of many an academic.

Jesper's research will be focusing on various aspects of topologically ordered phases of matter.

Jesper Romers was born in the Dutch city of Delft,
where he also completed his undergraduate studies at Delft University of
Technology. He then went to the University of Amsterdam, where he
completed a Master's and Ph.D. in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics.

Together with professor Sander Bais he developed a
framework in which the modular S-matrix of a Topological Quantum Field
Theory can be used as an order parameter to distinguish between
different phases related to one another by Bose condensation of
quasiparticles.

In collaboration with professor Kareljan Schoutens he
proposed wave functions for Charged Spin Textures (CSTs) over the
Moore-Read (M-R) fractional quantum Hall state. These excitations are an
incarnation of "half-Skyrmions" that are numerically predicted to be
present under certain conditions near the filling fraction 5/2. They
went on to show that the properties of these CSTs lock to the
non-Abelian statistics of the M-R state, which allows a novel mechanism
for the read-out of a topological quantum bit."